River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by
Walter Johnson. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press,
2013. vi, 526 pp. $35.00 US (cloth)

In 1803 the custodian of Spanish Louisiana, Napoleon Bonaparte,
sold the territory to the United States for approximately 15 million
dollars. The price included a debt from the War for Independence.
Bonaparte was at war, needed the money and had no strategic need of the
territory. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson's government had
simply sought freer access through the port of New Orleans. The French
cession put the Mississippi River and New Orleans wholly within the
United States and doubled the nation's sovereign territory taking
it west to the Rocky Mountains. The Louisiana Purchase would expand
Jefferson's luminous "empire of liberty," a boundless
space populated by independent republican farmers. And so it appeared in
the northwestern reaches of the Purchase. But a darker vision of empire
took shape in the sub-tropical lower Mississippi Valley, in a powerful
slave-based society within the ambit of the Mississippi River.

That "bright to dark" imagery introduces Walter
Johnson's ambitious new study of the Cotton Kingdom. The rich soil
and abundant land of Louisiana, Mississippi, and adjacent states were
exploited with distinct strains of cotton, steam-driven riverboats, and
global textile markets. Most important was the labour of hundreds of
thousands of slaves, measured by planters as so many "hands."
The millions of bales of cotton that went through New Orleans every year
began with the toil of the enslaved. By 1850 the Cotton Kingdom was the
wealthiest region in the United States.

Johnson's treatment of slave life, racism and human
degradation, and of the slave as labour producing commodity is powerful
and depressing. Some 95 per cent of all African Americans in the Cotton
Kingdom were in bondage, in a conspicuous colour line between slavery
and freedom. As with all scholars seeking a slave perspective, Johnson
has to rely on limited sources. The few available slave narratives,
including that of the well-known Solomon Northrop, cannot speak for the
millions of illiterate, trapped slaves who lived and died in the Cotton
Kingdom. However, for the most part, the narratives amplified by
ancillary evidence are handled with tact and some theorizing. It seems
that in order to address scholarly theories of "accommodation"
and fatalism, Johnson's cotton-bound "slave community"
did not succumb to the regime but adopted caring and cooperation as
defensive and resistance strategies. Otherwise, Johnson's typical
slave appears to be malnourished, ragged, intimidated and routinely
whipped or beaten. The reader will find no benevolent masters in
Johnson's composite plantation culture.

Johnson is a polished writer. His fondness for allusion in some of
his fourteen chapter titles, leads, for example to the self-evident
"The Steamboat Sublime," "Dominion," "Carceral
Landscape," and "The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny." He also
uses detail effectively to illustrate a particular theme or topic. In
one example he traces the fate of a bale of cotton with great facility
by following the trail from the worn fingers of the slave picker across
thousands of miles to the appraisal of the bale's value by a
Liverpool broker. Johnson's chapters on the Mississippi's
unique hydrology, seasonal shifts in river usage, on steamboat
technology, and the logistics of a thousand plus miles of commerce and
communication include a lively analysis of the sociology of the
river's class- and race-layered culture.

Wealth made for cosmopolitan affectations but the absence of
sufficient food production, rudimentary manufacturing and strong banking
and insurance infrastructure denied the Cotton Kingdom the economic
autonomy it sought. If the spectre of a Mississippi version of Haiti
kept planters awake at night, so too did worry over their future as
simply "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The planter
classes were in fact wrapped in the ultimate parochialism of their
"civilization."

Eventually the river's dominance was threatened with east- and
west-oriented railroads. Moreover, as Johnson clearly shows, the great
enterprise could not avoid tariffs, the politics of sectionalism, bitter
debates over western extension, and the Cotton Kingdom's dependency
on economic and political forces beyond its borders. Nevertheless, the
racialist logic of the "peculiar institution" combined with
cotton wealth made for grand imperial illusions. The Lower
Mississippi's "Manifest Destiny" did not include
California or Oregon or even Kansas for that matter, but rather the
Caribbean and Central America. In addition to a desire for free trade,
some of the region's planters and journalists sought expansion into
Cuba and Nicaragua and a reopening of the African slave trade, which had
been constitutionally closed since 1808. That grandiose reasoning
envisioned a flood of cheaper African slaves, which in turn would
depress prices in the domestic slave trade. In a perverse version of
democracy, lowering the cost would make slaves available to
non-slaveholding whites so that they might exercise their racial status
in property. Those notions remained as stillborn dreams. William
Wilson's Nicaragua adventure cost him his life. As for Cuba, Cotton
Kingdom boosters supported General Narciso Lopez's disastrous 1851
invasion of Cuba to free the island from Spanish control. Johnson's
dramatic treatment of the ill-fated, tragi-comedy and the death of Lopez
is one of the book's highlights.

The Cotton Kingdom could not break its subservience to the
Liverpool cotton market. New York rose to dominate the trans-shipment of
much outgoing cotton and most of the imports headed to the cotton
states. Yet for all the obvious strains on the Cotton Kingdom this
remarkable society did not collapse from those strains. It took the
Civil War to destroy it, leaving behind a remarkable chapter in American
social, intellectual, and economic history

River of Dark Dreams adds to the crowded field of ante-bellum
historiography. Its 900 plus endnotes is a storehouse of contemporary
evidence and topical academic literature, and the lively, intelligent
flow of the writing is a reminder that effective scholarly work can also
be a pleasure to read. Johnson's talent for dramatic narrative
enlivens his cast of dreamers and schemers, brutes, promoters, and
megalomaniacs who always appear in the shadow of the pained, proud
ubiquitous slave. Johnson needs a brief annotated bibliography to go
with its copious notes because his conclusions are sure to arouse debate
in the academy. In any case this important and thoroughly engaging book
is a welcome examination of American historical identity.

Eric Nellis

University of British Columbia

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